Paradise lost in the Dominican Republic

VIDEO: Inside Anamuya Prison, Dominican Republic

BEACH

The beaches at the Gran Bahia Principe resort in Punta Cana are most popular among visitors from Canada and the United States.

LAS OLAS

Photos by Teviah Moro,The Hamilton Spectator

Las Olas, which means "waves" in Spanish, is the buffet-style restaurant where the Hamilton men got involved in a fight in May.

LAWYERS

Teviah Moro,The Hamilton Spectator

Legal services are available across from the courthouse and national police station in Higuey, a small city that's about 45 kilometres from Punta Cana's resorts.

NATIONAL POLICE

Teviah Moro,The Hamilton Spectator

The holding cells at Higuey's national police station, which is behind the courthouse, follow the "old model" of Dominican jails. The conditions there are horrible, says the director of Anamuya prison.

RELEASED

Cathie Coward,The Hamilton Spectator

Nick Miele, right, his wife Stacey Vernon front as well as his cousin Ben Costantini and his mom Maria Costantini are all glad to be home in Hamilton following 3 weeks in jail in the Dominican Republic.

Miele_wedding-DR

Special to The Hamilton Spectator

Nick and Stacey Miele on the wedding day, hours before Nick and his cousin Ben were arrested. Photo provided by the family.

NEW PRISON

Photos by Teviah Moro,The Hamilton Spectator

The prison in Anamuya is about two years old. Nick Miele, 34, and Ben Costantini, 18, were locked up there in June.

Punta Cana, Dominican Republic — When a Hamilton couple chose a beachside resort on the Dominican's sandy eastern coastline to exchange wedding vows, they didn't expect an intimate tour of the holiday destination's criminal justice system some say is corrupt.

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Stacey Miele says the price to free her husband and his cousin from a Dominican prison last month was $25,000 three weeks after the men were arrested following a fight at a Punta Cana resort on May 28.

"Without that money, they would still be in there," Miele told The Spectator this week.

The 31-year-old says she and her family are out $50,000 after doling out cash for a variety of reasons — ranging from fees for lawyers to payments for food and safety in prison, and footing the bill for extra days at the resort.

"It was quite a ride," she said.

Celia Meléndez, a Dominican lawyer who initially represented Nick Miele, 34, and Ben Costantini, 18, but referred her clients to a colleague, says the case left a bad taste in her mouth.

"They had to pay many people and that hurts me."

However, the district attorney in Higüey, where the case was handled, says everything was done to the letter of the law.

"It was a legal resolution in the Dominican Republic," Mercedes Santana Rodriguez told The Spectator.

In accordance with the law, the victim — identified as 46-year-old Canadian Nikolai Koutouzov in court documents — opted to abandon his rights before the tribunal, ending the criminal case, Santana Rodriguez said.

In the Dominican Republic, criminal cases and civil suits are intertwined.

Meléndez, however, still contends that some judicial districts in that country are hampered by entrenched corruption.

Another veteran observer of the legal system there says the unlikely pairing of tourist wealth and drug trafficking through the country's eastern coast fuels that corruption.

The system is "corrupt to the core," Jorge Pineda, the editor of an English-language newspaper, Dominican Today, said in an interview from Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital.

The Hamilton men's ordeal serves as a cautionary tale that sheds light on what can happen when Canadians who travel to the Caribbean tourist destination wind up on the wrong side of the law.

In 2011, Canadians made 778,300 trips to the Dominican Republic, making it the sixth-most visited country, according to Statistics Canada. (The most frequently visited country for Canadians is the United States, followed by Mexico.)

In an emailed statement Thursday, a spokesperson for Diane Ablonczy, minister of state for foreign affairs, said the government "takes the safety and security of Canadians abroad seriously."

The current advisory urges Canadians to "exercise a high degree of caution due to a high crime rate."

"Canadians who travel abroad are always subject to local laws," Zanin added.

The Hamilton men were charged with "physical aggression" after a fight broke out at the Gran Bahia Principe resort in Punta Cana, where only hours earlier, the newlyweds had tied the knot.

At the courthouse in Higüey, the tribunal handed the men three months of "preventative prison" because they posed a flight risk and to give the prosecution time to investigate.

Nick Miele, a construction worker, and Costantini, who works at the Hamilton Farmers' Market, maintained their innocence, but faced a two-year sentence and $100,000 US in damages claimed by a Canadian who was hurt in the fight.

Lawyers presented the cost of the men's freedom and the civil settlement as one and the same, Stacey Miele said, referring to the $25,000 cash payment.

"The exchange of money isn't done in the courthouse," added Miele, who works at a bank in Waterdown. "It's done outside the courthouse. It's literally done on the side of the street."

Santana Rodriguez, the district attorney, said she wasn't privy to the details of the civil settlement.

"I don't know what agreement they had," she said. "We did not intervene in this."

Out-of-court settlements are common in the Dominican Republic, as they are in Canada The Spectator has no evidence that any officials pocketed any of the $25,000 or engaged in illegal activity.

But the Hamilton contingent is bewildered by how their legal ordeal played out.

Stacey Miele said the family was backed into a corner.

"At that point, we were just desperate to do anything we could to get them out."

At the outset, a man masquerading as a lawyer willing to work on the family's behalf said the case could be settled by paying $110,000, she recalled.

They rejected the man's offer, Miele said, but only after her uncle gave him $500 in the hope he could get her husband and his cousin out of trouble.

After considerable media coverage and liaising with Canadian consular officials, the Dominican prosecution dropped charges against the Hamilton men. On June 17, they were released from prison and allowed to return home.

That evening, the Canadian government issued a statement welcoming the resolution.

"We are pleased that the two Canadian parties involved in an altercation in the Dominican Republic have found common ground in order to resolve their situation," Ablonczy said.

The next day, in the House of Commons, Hamilton MP David Sweet praised Canadian consular staff for working with Dominican judicial officials.

"Thanks to the efforts of the Canadian consular officials in the Dominican Republic, who were praised by officials in the Dominican justice system, and to the minister of state and consular affairs and her hardworking staff for their engagement on behalf of all Canadians involved," the Conservative MP said.

Sweet also noted Canadians abroad are "subject to local laws and local justice systems which are different from our own."

Asked to respond to the family's concerns, Zanin declined Thursday. "It would be inappropriate to comment on private legal matters."

A former Canadian diplomat who worked in the Dominican Republic says the country's legal system faces "significant challenges."

"The Dominican Republic tends to be a trans-shipment point for drugs coming from South America to North America, and this has a very negative impact on the legal system, and tends to compromise large parts of it," said Paul Durand, who was the Organization of American States' representative in the Dominican Republic from 2006 to 2009.

"At times, the legal system is rather impenetrable and lacking in transparency, so it's difficult working from the outside to make efficient use of it," Durand added.

Accounts of the dust-up at the Gran Bahia Principe vary.

The Hamilton contingent says two men starting fighting at a buffet-style eatery called Las Olas — which means "The Waves" -- between 2:30 and 3 a.m. As the men struggled, they knocked over the bride, who was at the buffet.

Nick Miele "threw them off" and "in the process, a couple of fists were thrown to the body," Rick Vernon, Stacey's father, told The Spectator, likening the conflict to a "bar fight."

One of the men ran off, but returned to slug the other in the face, he said, adding the attacker kicked his opponent — identified in court documents as 46-year-old Nikolai Koutouzov — twice in the head while he was on the ground. Then he ran off.

"This guy was never found. Never looked for," Vernon said.

In contrast, a statement by Koutouzov's wife (listed as both Maria Loutouzov and Marina Pivovarova in the court documents) identifies Miele and Costantini as the aggressors.

In his civil claim against the Hamilton men, Koutouzov (whose surname is also spelled Koutouzob in the paperwork) says the blows came so fast and furious, at one point he thought he would be killed.

A doctor's report notes Koutouzov, suffering from head trauma and facial bruising and cuts, was sent to a Santo Domingo hospital.

The Spectator wasn't able to reach Koutouzov or his wife for comment.

Employees at the Gran Bahia Principe were deeply troubled by the fight at Las Olas, says the general manager of the Spanish-owned resort.

An unusual occurrence, the struggle was both a confusing and exceptionally violent episode, Ignacio M. Subias Cano said in an interview at the hotel.

Security did their best to sort out the melee, he said.

"There were two people who were identified by the people who were there — by the witnesses who were there — as part of the fight. There was a lot of tumult."

A hotel employee who spoke to the Hamilton contingent shortly after the struggle but didn't witness the fight, believes Miele and Costantini were unjustly implicated. Security should have investigated before pouncing on them as the instigators, he said.

It's not the resort's role, nor within its ability, to investigate such an incident, Subias Cano said.

"The protocol is very simple," he noted. "It's to call the police and nothing else."

The police are the weakest link in the Dominican criminal justice chain, says another Dominican legal expert.

A lack of resources hinders the collection of reliable evidence, says Manuel Ramón Peña Conce, a lawyer who was director of Universidad Católica Santo Domingo's law school for 17 years.

"This also affects the quality of the judgment," he added.

However, Peña Conce, believes the justice system has improved a great deal. In 1997, a sweeping reform of the Supreme Court set justice on the right path, he said. In addition to a structural overhaul, new chief justices were appointed.

(7) Comments

By Kristina|SEPTEMBER 03, 2013 03:36 PM

My family did find closure from the results of the investigation but if you are truly concerned that you know more than my family, the investigators, or the embassy on this matter, I encourage you to discuss your concerns with my family directly or with the authorities. Otherwise, I suggest not relying on gossip or hearsay as a reliable source of information.
- Kristina Zubrinic
(Please see the comment below as I had to use 2 comment boxes)

In response to Josie’s comment written July 13th:
As Jeremy’s sister, I would like to personally clarify that my family worked closely with the embassy and investigators to find answers after my brother’s passing. We found it unnecessary to involve the media because of the cooperation and support we received. I find your comments not only hurtful but disrespectful towards my family and myself. It is completely ignorant to assume that my family did not investigate this simply because you were not reading about it in a newspaper.
(please continue reading below)...

Curious that people so often assume corruption when something like this happens in another country. The real trick when travelling abroad, no matter where, is to recognize that the laws and the system of jurisprudence will, at the very least, be different from home. Add to that a language barrier and you have a recipe for disaster for those who assume they can travel freely and safely and occasionally arrogantly around the globe wearing their Canadian citizenship as though it were armour. Good luck with that. When travelling abroad, whether it's the Caribbean or Mexico or Buffalo, New York remember that the only thing foreign is YOU.

I didn't notice in any of the comments from the family that these poor victims of a corrupt justice system actually beat up a guy. I don't think the laws in the Dominican are any different from our own laws in that regard. Simply put, if you beat up somebody, you're going to jail. If a couple of people from DR had done the same thing here, they'd still be in jail.

I have a comment for the reporter that went down there on the Esmeralda, just to show how bad this resort is there was a drowning in the pool there last summer that was suspicious at the time, even the people who work there are still talking about it. The persons name was Jeremy Zubrinic and I don't understand why the parents didn't look into it further but it seems that most people don't seem to think it was an accident. It would be interesting to see if this accident did occur at the Esmeralda and maybe we could add that to the list of things that happen at this resort. I really would like to make sure that Canadians stay away for the entire Bahia Principe complex, too dangerous!